I mentioned in my last post that I thought our federal government
these days seemed to excel at doing dumb, self-defeating things. With a tip of the hat to Johnny Carson, here
is my own “top 10” list of dumb, counter-productive, self-defeating things our
federal government has done in recent times, covering both the Bush and Obama
administrations so that the blame is fairly spread over both political parties:
No. 10 – Since campaign money is already severely distorting
the electoral process, remove the last effective restraint on unlimited funding
from corporations (Supreme Court Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission) so that the problem
will be worse.
No. 9 – Increase the number of drone attacks on suspected
terrorists, thereby killing more innocent civilians who happen to be nearby,
increasing the already sky-high resentment against America in the Middle East and
helping immensely the recruiting of new terrorists.
No. 8 – Since the various intelligence and domestic
investigatory agencies were seen, after 9/11, to be too big, slow-moving and bureaucratic
to be effective, combine them all into a single new agency called “homeland
security” which is an order of magnitude bigger, slower-moving and more bureaucratic.
No. 7 - When immigration is the only thing keeping America
from the demographic woes of other first world nations (losing workers at the
same time they are gaining old people), when immigrants started 28% of all new
U.S. businesses in 2011, despite accounting for just 13% of the U.S. population,
and are twice as likely as the native-born to start a new business, require the
world’s best and brightest who come to this country to get a good education to
leave the country just when they are ready to become productive and create US jobs.
No. 6 - With entitlement expenses (Medicare, Medicaid &
Social Security) already growing so fast that, unless the law is changed, they
will consume almost one-fifth of the nation’s gross domestic product, and
almost the entire federal budget, by 2050, make the problem worse by adding a $1.2
trillion drug plan to Medicare.
No. 5 - Since some US banks are deemed “too big to allow to
fail”, encourage them to take over other failing banks so that now they are
even bigger, and their potential failure even more of a threat to the economy.
No. 4 - With the federal government already borrowing about
40 cents of every dollar spent, increase federal spending by 29% between 2007
and 2009, and keep it there.
No. 3 - In the midst of a major recession, when all federal
efforts ought to have been focused on improving the economy and reducing
unemployment, spend 18 months and most of the available political capital
pushing through a 2000+ page health bill so complex that to this day it is
poorly understood and quite possibly impossible to implement.
No. 2 - Get us into two simultaneous unwinnable
ground wars in the Middle East, the “graveyard of empires”, when any half-educated
student of history knows that invaders from Alexander the Great and Genghis
Khan to the British Empire and the Soviet Union came to grief in these areas.
No. 1 - Having got us into these unfortunate and unwinnable
wars, keep us in them, bleeding money, lives, and American good will around the
world for 12 years, twice as long as World War II.
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